RIPR is a (paper) newsletter and a weekly column appearing in ten
of Rhode Island's finer newspapers. The goal is to look at local,
state and federal policy issues
that affect life here in the Ocean State, concentrating on action, not
intentions or talk.

If you'd like to help, please contribute
an item, suggest an issue topic, or buy a subscription. If you can,
buy two or three (subscribe here).

Search this site

whole site
RIPR back issues

Available Back Issues:

Aug 09 (38) - How your government's
economic policies have worked against you. What a fake nineteenth
century nun can teach us about the tea party protests.

Subscription information:

Contact:

For those of you who can read english and understand it, the following
is an email address you are welcome to use. If you are a web bot, we hope
you can't understand it, and that's the point of writing it this way.

About

The Rhode Island Policy Reporter is an independent news source that
specializes in the technical issues of public policy that matter so
much to all our lives, but that also tend not to be reported very
well or even at all. The publication is owned and operated by Tom
Sgouros, who has written all the text you'll find on this site,
except for the articles with actual bylines.

Responsibility:

Tom Sgouros

Wed, 26 May 2010

Central Falls is broke, we read. Last week, the city council voted
4-1 to take the city into receivership. And now the commentary
sweepstakes begin, with every editorialist and analyst rushing to
offer their opinion. I guess I'm among them, but let me start by
offering a little ridicule of my peers.

I read one "analysis" that said that Central Falls was too small to be
independent, and it should join with Lincoln, Cumberland, or
Pawtucket. This is your typical 30-second analysis: superficially
plausible, but fundamentally ridiculous. With analysis like this,
we'll all be broke soon. Central Falls is in a bind because their
property tax revenue can't pay their expenses. Why should any other
town want to accept that burden? None of its neighboring towns are
exactly pillars of financial strength. Were Pawtucket to annex
Central Falls, what would be the result except to bring Pawtucket a
step closer to its own fiscal armageddon?

Perhaps it's interesting to ask how they got in this bind? Why, after
all, is Central Falls so small? Who was it who thought such a small
city was viable? Well, maybe it was all the rich people who used to
live there.

Central Falls was a wealthy community of manufacturers and their
employees when the larger town of Smithfield broke up in the 19th
century, leaving it as the smallest piece. There was no question of
its viability then; there was plenty of money to go around. Even as
late as 1950, measured by amount of taxable property per student in
its schools, Central Falls was one of the richest towns in the state,
behind only Providence, Pawtucket and Woonsocket, and there was a
considerable gap between them and fifth-place Newport. (Narragansett
was actually first, but that's only because they had so few students,
so I ignore them here.)

So what happened? The biggest demographic shift in our state and our
nation's history, that's what. In the second half of the 20th
century, our nation perfected suburbs, and the highways and cars that
made them possible. In 1950, it was thought stupid to expect to live
in East Greenwich and work in Providence; the country was for hicks.
By 1970, that was no longer true. By 1990, the reverse was true for
many. This is the very definition of an epochal shift. During those
years, hundreds of thousands of people moved from our urban centers to
what had been the countryside. Rich neighborhoods like Central Falls
or Elmwood in Providence became desperately poor ones, while poor
places like East Greenwich became quite rich. Central Falls became
the poorest municipality in the state, followed by Woonsocket,
Providence, Burrillville, and Pawtucket.

I have no idea, really, if there was mismanagement and corruption in
Central Falls. (And let's be honest, the same is true of virtually
everyone who claims certainty on the subject.) The evidence I do know
about suggests there was some of each -- and I dearly hope that each
is rewarded justly -- but at worst this only hastened the crisis
rather than causing it. Central Falls is far poorer in taxable
property per citizen than even Woonsocket, the next poorest
municipality in the state. Even so, they have to satisfy the same
code requirements on their buildings, the same water standards for
their citizens, the same readiness requirements for their emergency
services and all the rest of what we demand of our cities and towns.

What caused this crisis? There are three primary factors. First,
property values declined as wealthy people sold in order to move out
of town. Second, less wealthy people moving in to take advantage of
those new housing bargains tended to require more services. Third,
state legislators and governors refused to support Central Falls or
any of the other municipalities in this bind, preferring to blame them
for it, while imagining that the same rules that apply to a
fast-growing East Greenwich can be used to judge a shrinking
Providence.

Adding insult to injury, over the past half-century the state has
actually subsidized the growth of the suburbs and the flight from the
cities. Highway funds are but one example. Route 2, the backbone of
commercial sprawl in Cranston and Warwick, was built and is maintained
with state highway dollars, but only up to the Providence line. In
town, Route 2 is the city's responsibility. In addition, school
construction funds and dozens of hidden subsidies help keep the cost
of suburban living down, at the expense of our cities.

Here's the important part: the state overall didn't lose taxpayers
during the decades after 1950. On the contrary, our taxpaying
population and the taxes we collect went way up. What state
government lost was the will to ask its citizens to support the cities
even while it encouraged the flight to the suburbs.

The crisis in Central Falls is nothing more than the logical and
predictable outcome of a set of policies that devastated our cities
while creating the suburban sprawl most of us now live in. Mayor
Charles Moreau and his receiver stand ready to use the receivership
process to gut their labor contracts and punt on their bonds, but it
will be in vain. The forces that created their crisis are still at
work. If they can lower the cost of government in Central Falls, they
will only put off the day of reckoning by another few years.

We will not see a solution to the crisis affecting Central Falls --
but also all the other cities and towns in the state -- until we admit
that we are in the middle of a municipal funding crisis decades in the
making. We have set up incentives and a tax structure that make
sensible management of our cities virtually impossible. That's the
real crisis in Central Falls.

Fri, 21 May 2010

...the Hartford Courants Colin McEnroe contacted a wide range of
Connecticut political reporters about the Blumenthal matter (click here). McEnroe says he asked
reporters, anchors and columnists to tell him whether they
could remember Blumenthal ever claiming to have served in
Vietnam and whether they had been under the
impression...that Blumenthal had served in Vietnam. Again and
again, these experienced reporters told McEnroe that they had never
seen Blumenthal misstate his record, and that they never believed that
he had served in Nam. This tracks the earlier statement by Christopher
Keating, the Courants Hartford bureau chief. On Tuesday
evenings NewsHour, Keating told Judy Woodruff that he had
attended many veterans events at which Blumenthal spoke, but he never
heard him misstate his record (see THE
DAILY HOWLER, 5/20/10).

The original story about Blumenthal increasingly seems to me to be
nothing more than an opposition hatchet job, parroted by a credulous
Times reporter, who doesn't seem to have realized that working for
that paper demands a high level of responsibility and care. Stories
there set the agenda for millions of people and thousands of other
reporters and professional chatterers, all of whom will use the
Times's reputation as a shield for the most insulting and unjustified
speculation. I hope Raymond Hernandez is ok with what he's done to
Richard Blumenthal and the state of Connecticut (and the US Senate).

The Daily Howler goes on:

This is precisely how it was done to Gore. The bogus
claims get their start at the Times, then get repeated,
embellished. (At Morning Joe, eight turns into
hundreds.)